How would players break balance if it was literally not an option to transfer to a majority faction? It would either be better balance or no change. It wasn’t the players that opened up virtually condition-free paid transfers, that was Blizzard’s decision. Of course players are going to behave in ways that benefit them, but that doesn’t absolve Blizzard of the decision to allow reckless transfers to happen.
It doesn’t have transfers only because people were smarter and all rolled on the same two servers
Great thread, after reading the blue posts I had a lot of the same takeaways. They’re trying for a slam-dunk solution that just fixes everything but they have a lot of different issues that require different solutions.
They need to divide and conquer the issues separate with different solutions on different realm types. For instance, talking about faction imbalance means one thing on a PVP realm and a something completely different on a PVE realm. As someone that doesn’t play on a PVP realm my perspective/wants are completely different. PVE doesn’t care about balanced faction pop they just want a pop thats large enough to find groups, can find people when you need to recruit, and have an economy where you can buy and sell stuff.
I encourage Blizzard to divide the concerns of PVE and PVP realms into different buckets and try to tackle those with solutions tailored to each realm type.
Additionally the whole, we wouldn’t do this because we don’t think you’ll do this argument is lame. Some people like small realms but wouldn’t mind a trickle of new blood, you’d be surprised how far 10-20 new people can expand a low pop faction. PVE realms should probably always have the option to transfer to low population realms and grossly imbalanced factions on any realm.
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Blizzard once again looking immediately to failed retail game design for their solution to the problem they created. Cross-realm would be a disaster, one that many people went to Classic to get away from.
Thats how FREE xfers should have worked absolutely. If you’re giving someone something for free, there is often a concession. If you wanted a free xfer off a dying server, the concession should have been that you would have to “fight” it out on a minority faction server for awhile, and through that process shore up those minority factions populations.
They could have killed 2 birds with one stone… Instead they just created a whole new flock of super birds with laser beaks…
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What if you don’t want to be on a balanced realm and at some point, specifically elected to move to a realm where your faction is in the majority? We have years of data that suggests that, on a long enough timeline, the population for most PvP realms will tend to skew towards one faction or the other and that this skew often starts as the result of more incoming players joining the majority faction, rather than players leaving the minority faction.
Overall, the data we have suggests that, broadly, players don’t seem to want an even playing field and/or they care more about having their faction be heavily populated and lively than they care about their realm being balanced.
Well yeah, it will never be fixed when the developers think things like this and gaslights everyone by pretending as if faction-specific free transfers aren’t a thing
“We are totally okay with one faction power tripping over the other faction until they leave or quit” LOL
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woW is literally a game of strangers. I only know my guild and a few randoms. We have some server idiots and some funny people in trade chat yet that doesn’t mean we’re somehow connected more than the same horde or alliance I see in random Bgs from time to time.
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I wholeheartedly disagree. Maybe retail but I think it’s that sense of community that is one of the defining characteristics of Classic vs retail and thus one of the things people defend most vehemently. Even on Bene there are voices I hear in discord that I recognize from Faerlina.
I played retail for months and never managed to join a guild. I never saw the same person twice and the only time I ever joined discord was for arena games. It felt like the League of Legends of MMO’s and even though there are a lot of things about retail I like the whole thing just feels so… soulless… and I still always end up returning to Classic. I quit WOW altogether during Wrath and literally didn’t play for over a decade… and somehow Classic brought me back enough that I’ve been playing it an almost embarrassing amount for the last 2 years. And while a lot that is the gameplay… a lot it is also the community. There are people in Classic I’ve spent more (virtual) time with than people I know well IRL and who I will probably have some connection with for years to come. I just never got anything even close to that out of retail
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They literally don’t. Blizz said the data indicates that players simply don’t use the free transfers to do what you’re suggesting. Blame them.
I don’t always agree with your posts Bearhands but I really like your posts like this. I’m glad you’re still finding a sense of community on Benediction.
I agree with you on Retail and coming back to Classic completely, I thought it was me growing out of the game but it was the (changes to the) game.
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You know… I’m not here to gain a fan club lol. I say what I say and sometimes people agree, sometimes they dont. The only thing that I wish, and the thing that does sometime irritate me… is that people would take each post at face value. Too often people troll me because they’re upset I disagreed with them a month ago about something completely different but… on my end anyway, I bear no grudges. I disagree with people on a wide variety of things in RL too but we usually eventually find some common ground also. 
Yep, most of the forum posters I agree with some of what they say and don’t agree with some of what they say. As long as people are respectful to each other it’s all good (some people I am not a fan of, that’s how it goes).
You have done a very good job explaining what you like about your transfer to Benediction, including more unique comments about the community stuff for you, and I can totally respect that.
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Yea I mean Bene has been good so far and its nice to be able to have people to play with. But don’t me wrong… I would have much rather been able to keep our community on Faerlina alive. Unfortunately a combination of a community obsessed with instant gratification and poor management by blizzard made that untenable so… xferring was the silver lining on a bad situation.
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Faction specific transfers based on population do not really work from a technical standpoint for a multitude of reasons.
There would be negative consequences of such system - even if rare.
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Ignoring for the time being that faction balance specific transfers don’t work for technical reasons…
Then people wouldn’t take the xfer (when paid xfers are available).
The only way your suggestion works is if it is the only option.
And then would those players choose to transfer or just quite entirely?
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Now why would you think that’s the case? That literally doesn’t make any sense at all. Blizzard sets under what circumstances people can transfer. Blizzard has the data to make informed decisions on how it sets those limits,. To pretend they can’t do it for “technical reasons” is either naive or disingenuous.
Option A is free but carries some risk
Option B costs $25 but carries less risk
To claim everyone is going to automatically pick option b is either… naive or disingenuous.
Even more to the previous point. ESPECIALLY for people who are looking at quitting entirely… a free xfer is at the least a hail mary for those players. Such a player is more than likely not willing to invest $25 in a game they’re considering quitting entirely… but they very well might be willing to pay $25 to move from a server of 300 people to one of 3000 people though they happen to be outnumbered 2:1
A). Faction popularity can change on a dime.
B). Xfers to a server change faction density.
C) there is a realistic possibility (but rare) that if groups of guilds decide to all xfers at once…. It causes a balance switch in the middle of xfering which turns of xfers… and destroying those guilds.
Oh come on… Faction balance doesn’t change “on a dime…” Since when has a server ever gone from “dominant horde” to “dominant Alliance” overnight. It just doesn’t happen. It certainly doesn’t happen so fast that someone wouldnt be able to adjust before it had a real impact… Again… just disingenuous.
Literally just what you said before phrased slightly differently…
Isn’t that exactly what happened to servers like benediction?
Massive amount of guilds all decided to xfer.
On a faction enforced server - it would break up those communities because only the first x% of them would be successful before the server becomes unbalanced.
It didnt “just happen” Bene has been 65/35ish for a while… and over the course of months it became increasingly more and more alliance dominated. They could allowed free horde xfers into Bene months ago and it wouldn’t have just suddenly become horde dominant overnight… And even when allowing free xfers into the most ideal alliance server, itt still took months for Bene to go from 12k to 22k
I mean how big/unorganized a community are you talking here? If you’re talking a guild they should easily be able to transfer everyone over in a week without/before any sort of inbalance flag occuring. If you’re talking a community of thousands transferring over the course of several weeks then yea… that’s possible… But at that point how cohesive a community are we really talking… and what “low pop servers” does that actually apply to?